Tuesday, September 17, 1996 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE Mixed Signals at KPFK The Pacifica radio network--long a voice of the left--says it is trying to bring order to the chaos at its stations. But ousted show hosts say the changes violate free speech and aren't going quietly. By HECTOR TOBAR, Times Staff Writer The war for control of the national Pacifica Radio network reached a crescendo the night the dissidents sneaked into a San Fernando Valley studio and took control of KPFK's 112,000-watt FM transmitter. It was a bold coup de radio, staged by leftist programmers who'd been axed by the station management. "It's either plantation radio or it's liberation radio," defiant program host Ron Wilkins proclaimed to thousands of stunned listeners, even as general manager Mark Schubb moved frantically toward the switch that would take the dissidents off the air. "It's controlled speech, or free speech." Depending on whom you ask, the brief takeover at KPFK's Studio City offices in February was either the act of a lunatic fringe that had brought the station and the network to the brink of anarchy or the heroic last stand of radicals loyal to Pacifica's half-century of progressive ideals. The five-station Pacifica network, long the standard-bearer of alternative radio, has for much of the past year been caught up in an acrimonious struggle over its future: Can the network remain true to its radical mission while bringing order and economic sense to its sloppily organized coalition of volunteer activists? The conflicts have been especially nasty at the Southern and Northern California flagships, KPFK here (90.7 on the dial) and KPFA in Berkeley. For some, the struggles at Pacifica can be seen as an allegory of the American left and its fragmentation by the "identity politics" of race and gender. With opposing camps assaulting each other in ever-more-acrimonious debate, the movement as a whole finds itself marginalized by the rightward shift of national politics. It has splintered because "people are more concerned with what separates people than with what unites them," says author Mike Davis, who has written about the left. "Clearly, these issues have surfaced at KPFK and produced a pretty awful situation. The station is suspended between different generations and different radio cultures." Founded by pacifists in 1949, the network remains unabashedly leftist. On Pacifica, a program advocating the lifting of sanctions against Libya and Iraq can still find a sympathetic audience. In another era, Pacifica gave voice to the Beat Generation and was among the first to give air time to gays and lesbians. At KPFK, the evening news program is a bulletin board for activists, with interviewees calling for boycotts and hunger strikes to support causes as diverse as AIDS funding and immigration rights. But before management began reform efforts in 1993, the station schedule followed no discernible logic and few programs occupied the same time slot from one week to the next. Given free rein, a handful of programmers engaged in what critics called hate speech largely directed against Jews and homosexuals. More common was a doctrinaire rant based on race more than class that alienated even the station's loyal, Old Left listeners. Pacifica managers say the nonprofit foundation's national board of directors had lost control of station content to volunteer groups that had taken over the local community advisory boards. New managers were hired to restore order, including Schubb, who became general manager at KPFK in mid-1995. After several shake-ups, expelled programmers and their audience supporters began to accuse bosses of plotting the "NPR-zation" of Pacifica. The dissidents have formed groups such as "Take Back KPFA" in Berkeley and have staged demonstrations at meetings of Pacifica's national board of directors, attacking "racist" hiring practices. They argue that network managers violated long-standing democratic procedures in their attempt to clean out programmers with ties to minority communities. Wilkins, a 12-year veteran of KPFK, charges that Pacifica is trying to "create a new audience that is more white, more mainstream, more Westside." The dissidents have also charged that Pacifica--one of the few employers to include May Day and International Women's Day among its paid holidays--is trying to break the network's union. At KPFK, managers say they're only trying to bring a measure of professionalism to a station that had degenerated into "public-access radio" for small cliques of extreme ethnic nationalists who made it the laughingstock of local public broadcasting. Perhaps the low point at KPFK occurred in 1994 when local management terminated two programs after the Anti-Defamation League charged the station with broadcasting anti-Semitic hate speech. (On KPFK's "Freedom Now," the league had been accused of founding the Ku Klux Klan). The controversy reached congressional committees and for a time Pacifica became a favorite target of the right-wing movement to eliminate funding for public radio. "This station is too important to allow those negative losers to rule," general manager Schubb says of the dissidents. "It's time for us to get our act together and get organized and smart." Schubb jokes that he knew he was in trouble when he took a job where "every car in the parking lot has a bumper sticker that says 'Question Authority.' " A year after taking charge, Schubb, 40, has the air of a man who's grown weary of being insulted. He says that while most of the shrillest elements have left the station, they still assault him at meetings of the station's advisory board. And then there are all those nasty Internet postings. "If you tried to stand up to [the dissidents], they would call you sexist, homophobic, a racist," Schubb says, recalling his first days as general manager. "The most horrible, terrible persons would get their way." Change was overdue, says Pat Scott, national executive director for the Pacifica Foundation, which runs the California stations and three other affiliates, in Washington, D.C., Houston and New York. The network had become Balkanized with programs catering to a mishmash of competing ethnic and interest groups. "We can't be a private club for a few people to talk to their friends," Scott says. "It's just like any other organization. We have to change with changing times." The dissidents argue that such a vision is being implemented at the expense of dozens of volunteers whose quirky programs didn't fit the national board's vision of what the new Pacifica should be. At Berkeley's KPFA, the canceled programs include many with names that reflect the station's radical traditions: "Freedom Is a Constant Struggle," "Labor and the Global Economy," and "Living on Indian Time." "Pacifica claimed to be, and was, the voice of the voiceless," says Jeffrey Blankfort, a San Francisco activist with the Bay Area group Take Back KPFA. "With the new strategy, that has been eliminated." Blankfort and others charge that Scott's mainstream leanings include seeking corporate underwriting and pandering to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (The CPB provides about 20% of the network's $8.5-million annual budget. The rest comes from listener donations). At KPFK, Ruben Lizardo, a former chair of the station advisory board, said at first he sympathized with those who argued Pacifica had to "get rid of all the people who don't know what they're doing and are stuck in the '60s." KPFK was in a funk, and its audience was not only getting older, it was beginning to shrink. But Lizardo split with station management when it refused to reinstate several African American programmers, as recommended by KPFK's community advisory board. (The programmers had been removed for making offensive on-air comments, a charge they disputed). Then Lizardo and other members of the advisory board were forced to resign. Management claimed radicals had taken over the board and were using it to try to usurp the Pacifica Foundation's authority. Separate purges soon alienated a dizzying variety of station groups, leading to what Lizardo calls an "unholy alliance" among axed minority programmers and "the tree-hugging vegetarian crowd, the folk people and the atheists." Dissent and anger grew as Pacifica entered into negotiations with union members over a new contract. Some of the network's 120 employees charged that Pacifica had hired a labor-relations consultant notorious as a union-buster. Scott, herself a former union organizer, denies trying to break the union and says the charges are a negotiating ploy. Through it all, Wilkins, a self-described Pan-Africanist with a silky voice, had managed to keep his program "Continent to Continent" on the air. Others, disillusioned with the conflicts at KPFK, decided to break out on their own. (One was Michael Taylor, a former homeless man who was killed April 22 in mysterious circumstances that police say involved his attempt to establish a pirate, "micro-radio" station.) Finally, saying he could no longer stomach the changes at the station, Wilkins decided to act. On the night of Feb. 27, he came in to host his program, then brought in Lizardo and several dismissed African American programmers through a back door. To keep management from getting an inkling of what was about to happen, he started off his show by reading an African history calendar. "Feb. 14, 1989," the last entry began. "Salman Rushdie retreats into hiding after receiving a death sentence for blaspheming Islam in his racist novel 'The Satanic Verses.' " Wilkins then introduced the dissidents. For about 15 minutes, they broadcast their litany of complaints against Pacifica management. Lizardo blamed KPFK's problems on "the white Left." Nzinga Heru, an African American programmer whose show, "Hotep," was pulled off the air, added: "I am a firm believer that we in fact are at war. I'm not surprised what the enemy would do in order to attack us and to suppress truth." "Black people and white people do not think alike," Heru continued. "We do not think alike and we have the right to have our own critical thoughts." Finally, Schubb appeared, separated from the dissidents in the studio by a thick pane of soundproof glass. "I see the manager in master control," Wilkins said calmly. "Maybe he may want to join us. I'm sure he can hear our signal." Seconds later, Schubb cut the dissidents off (without explanation to the listening audience), shifting to a cheerful promo tape for a women's radio program: "Feminist Magazine brings you education, information and controversy--on the air!" "I only heard five minutes of it but I knew it was garbage," Schubb says, "and a complete distortion of what was happening at the station." Since the confrontation, Schubb and other KPFK employees say they have gone about the business of resurrecting a station that was nearly comatose after years of poor management. Scott says she is drafting a new five-year plan to improve Pacifica program quality while remaining "committed to positive social change." "It's been Radio 101," says Beto Arcos, acting operations director. The station just last month ordered its first digital audiotape machines, standard operating equipment in nearly every FM station. Arcos proudly shows a reporter a file cabinet that contains perhaps 200 CDs--the beginning, he says, of the station's new music library. More than one office at KPFK's studios had become unusable because all the desks and filing cabinets and even the floors were stacked several feet high with unopened mail, tapes and miscellaneous debris. While cleaning out one office, Schubb found several unopened envelopes. Inside were checks from station contributors. Not cashed for three years or longer, they were now useless. Copyright Los Angeles Times